The Facebook Update: What's New in Facebook's Integrated Platform?

By Jen Burns on March 6, 2013

The intersection of Facebook and ecommerce may be appealing to apparel retailers, but for others, it fosters mixed emotions. Nicolas Franchet, Head of ecommerce at Facebook, spoke on the new marketing integrated platform that Facebook is offering to ecommerce companies.

It’s fab-ulous for apparel retailers

An excellent case study, Fab.com one of the fastest growing online retailers, shared that 30% of their daily referral traffic was coming from Facebook. In addition to referral traffic, they also referenced a 5x higher download of their mobile app. Fab.com also claims that for every 1 click they publish, they get 4 clicks in return. Fab.com is not currently using recommendations onsite, but with the growing number of products and content, we’d be very surprised if they weren’t actively looking into it.

The amount of ad targeting Facebook’s platform offers is incredible. From domain-based text ads, to photo page ads, link page ads and offers, Facebook isn’t above using profile data to make a buck or two. Nicolas encouraged eTail West attendees to focus spend on the ads that appear in mobile – the link page post ads. Surprisingly, they found that 75% of total claims being offered are from the friends of fans, and not the fans directly. For consumer brands, this is a great way to discover new customers.

Facebook exchange is the giant’s retargeting platform. “60% of time people leave without checking out. Where do they go next? Facebook” Nicolas said. With a retargeting platform, the dress your shopper didn’t purchase might “follow” them over to Facebook, creating an option for you to offer a better deal and link back for them to complete the transaction. In addition to retargeting based on history, you can even identify segments or prospects – by user ID.

How many types of user data?

Facebook’s formula is “The CRM data + 3rd party data + Facebook data = one high value customer cluster”. Their angle is to have retailers upload their customer’s data into Facebook, strengthening both the strategy of the retailers, and of course, Facebook’s database of knowledge of their own users…

Nicolas offered a few key takeaways… or rather suggestions:

Domain ads

Mobile app install ads

FBX *Facebook Exchange platform

Offers

PMD

Fans

Like Buttons

And some takeaways for the “more advanced” Facebook users:

Test your controls in your newsfeed and move advertising into the newsfeed. A majority of users will check updates on their phone and can avoid most advertising this way

Review privacy components for custom audiences

View tags and find an attribution window

Include the conversion pixel oCPM which is a campaign management tool offered in the platform

Facebook connect should be used for those considering deep integrations with FB

What’s next? The graph search is still very new and not yet tied to the advertising platform but as Nicolas described –“very powerful”

And if you want to gift your fans on Facebook, the gift card is still in the early days but a good Q4 was reported and there is still more to come.

One comment on “The Facebook Update: What's New in Facebook's Integrated Platform?”

Facebook calls these categories feeds, but I like to think of them as channels. The reason I like the channel analogy is because these are effectively advertising channels that will affect advertising on Facebook in the near future.